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WINNER OF THE ONDAATJE PRIZE 2025LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZEWATERSTONES WELSH BOOK OF THE MONTHWATERSTONES SCOTTISH BOOK OF THE MONTH"Tender, riveting and inventive is Clear, the newest offering and masterpiece from the brilliant Carys Davies. It will take your breath away" Sarah Jessica Parker"An exquisite, hopeful masterpiece" Rachel Joyce"A poignant, profound depiction of both solitude and connection. Carys Davies has written a masterful, discreetly sublime book" Hernan Diaz1843. On a remote Scottish island, Ivar, the sole occupant, leads a life of quiet isolation until the day he finds a man unconscious on the beach below the cliffs. The newcomer is John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister sent to evict Ivar and turn the island into grazing land for sheep. Unaware of the stranger's intentions, Ivar takes him into his home, and in spite of the two men having no common language, a fragile bond begins to form between them. Meanwhile, on the mainland, John's wife, Mary, anxiously awaits news of his mission.Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.
About the author
Carys Davies is the author of two novels,
The Mission House (Granta, 2020) and
West (Granta, 2018), which won the Wales Book of the Year Fiction award, was Runner-Up for the Society of Author's McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her short stories have been widely published in magazines and anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and have won the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, the Society of Authors' Olive Cook Award, the Royal Society of Literature's V S Pritchett Prize, and a Northern Writers' Award. Davies' second collection,
The Redemption of Galen Pike, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award 2015.
